Newsletter Deliverability Update
Over the past few weeks, we’ve had some issues with getting the newsletter delivered to each of your inboxes. Specifically, those with @yahoo.com and @aol.com addresses have been rejecting our emails. Read on for technical/geeky details. But if you ever DON’T get an expected newsletter (almost always sent out sometime Sunday, sometimes VERY late), please check the website under the Newsletter tab as they are automatically published there as soon as the emails are sent.
Next week, there likely WON’T be a newsletter due to the lull in meetings and activities with Summer Camp going on and Independence Day next week. Your newsletter editor will be on vacation the following 2 weeks however I should be able to send out a newsletter – my request is that if you have any article for the newsletter, please make sure to E-MAIL them to well in advance of the normal send out time as I will be overseas and may send them out much earlier than usual. Do not try to text me as I will not have access to texts while on vacation this time around.
Why are emails sometimes rejected (the tech-y stuff)?
Due to prior deliverability issues, I stopped using our web servers to send out emails and started using a 3rd party SMTP server (called Mailgun) to send out our emails. They have a free service, but that means we are still sharing our IP Address with other senders. Sometimes those other senders spam people and the IP address will get reported by the big boys (gmail, yahoo, aol, msn, etc) if enough of their users report spam emails. In this particular case, Yahoo (who delivers AOL emails as well) flat out rejected our shared IP address. (A few months ago, @msn did the same thing, but it seemed like a one-time issue. If you have @msn and didn’t get last week’s newsletter, that was due to newsletter editor error and should be resolved this week.) I have reported this to Mailgun, but instead of swapping IP addresses for us like they’ve done once before, they simply felt this was a temporary block. We will see with this newsletter just how temporary it was/is. By the way, this free service is also limiting how many emails we can send a month – we’ve never gotten too close to that limit, however if we have many flash alerts in a month, it’s conceivable that we could hit that limit (and have to pay). This is something I monitor of course.
What’s it all mean?
Not much! I will keep pressing Mailgun if Yahoo keeps rejecting emails and monitor our service. Just remember, you can always check the website for the latest (or any prior) newsletter. If you don’t see one listed, it means either I haven’t gotten to it yet, or one isn’t going to be sent. Also remember that we do keep our calendar up to date with almost all of our activities! You can easily subscribe to the calendar so it shows up on your phone/tablet/computer/etc. Just click the link at the bottom (or bottom-right depending on the device) to subscribe and it will auto-update on your calendar whenever we make changes (see image below).
Sorry for the long explanation, but I wanted to make sure everyone understand what was happening. When I took over Newsletter duties over 4 years ago, we had a very sporadic newsletter that sometimes wouldn’t go out for weeks or months at a time. I was always frustrated with the lack of communication and felt there must be an easy way to do it more frequently. While this method is not too difficult, obviously it comes with some limitations, but I will do my best to make sure it continues getting out to you on a (mostly) weekly basis! And as always, I’m open to suggestions, ideas, complaints, etc!
-Mr. Bielkiewicz
ASM of Mostly Consistent Communication